Submitted photo
A man in a white t-shirt and a mic and some dancers around a firepit.
Roberto Rivera, in the white t-shirt, with hip-hop artists at a community center near Cape Town, South Africa, in 2025.
Roberto Rivera first found hip-hop when he was 6 years old.
He lived in public housing at the Bayview Apartments on West Washington Avenue in the 1980s; that meant his neighborhood was one of the most diverse in the city.
“Hmong kids, Black kids, Latino kids — all of us together, all the time,” he remembers. “And one day, somebody got their hands on a Run-DMC tape.
“So, we got some cardboard and spent the whole afternoon breakdancing and listening to that tape over and over and over,” he continues. “It was this new kind of expression that felt so freeing.”
In the decades since, Rivera, 47, has used those same feelings to create a career rooted in the culture of hip-hop, carving out a niche: Helping others heal from the trauma and challenges of life with the help of hip-hop.
He’s not just a rapper and a dancer and he’s certainly not a record company executive. He’s an educator.
For the last several years, he’s been chief executive officer of the Alliance for the 7th Generation, which partners with schools and community organizations to create programs that teach students self-awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, and how to manage their emotions.
He’s become an advocate for social justice and racial equity while working to empower young people to improve communities for future generations — largely through the lens and magnetism of hip-hop culture.
“Hip-hop has the power to be disruptive — it disrupts the hierarchy,” says Rivera. “And that’s something that the youth can grab onto and they begin to understand that that power in their community doesn’t have to be a triangle with one person at the top — it can be a circle where, if we do this together, it’s more impactful and more sustainable.”
Rivera uses hip-hop in his work with young people not only as a magnet to draw their interest but to also show them how to use skills and interests they already have.
“We ask the students, ‘how are you smart?’ and then work to show them how to apply that,” he says. “If one of them is an amazing graffiti writer, we explain to them how they have this visual intelligence about space and shapes and help them strengthen that muscle.”
He would also teach students how to create and host events like open mic shows and block parties to give back to their community. And, of course, he would bring in others to help the students develop their hands-on skills.
“If they like to dance, we bring in a dance instructor and help them choreograph something,” he explains. “Or, if they like to rap, we bring in some really good rappers to help the students hone their craft.”
“It’s using the different elements of hip-hop – emceeing, deejaying, breakdancing and graffiti – to help them understand that however they are creating art is a manifestation of intelligence,” he continues. “So, it’s a balance of that, mixed with the social-emotional learning and critical-thinking development that creates the foundation for community change.”
This takes him around the world to educate other educators on how to do this work. He’s given a number of TED Talks and recently spoke at a hip-hop conference in Amsterdam. He’s also worked with youth in Cape Town, South Africa, to build a community center focused on creativity and well-being.
Rivera has also co-edited a book, Hip-Hop as Healing: The Art and Science of Healing in Tumultuous Times (with Emile Jansen) that contains personal stories of growth and recovery through hip-hop culture and education from many contributors.
He will present on his book and lead a workshop, “Towards Healing, Thriving, and Growth: The Ceremonial and Transformative Power of Hip-Hop Culture to Heal, Educate and Transform,” on the first day of the upcoming Dane Arts: Business of Art Conference April 23-24 at Arts & Literature Lab, 111 S. Livingston St.
Submitted photo
Lacouir Yancey, left, Emile Jansen and Roberto Rivera relax after giving a talk at the South African Hip-Hop Museum in 2023. Jansen and Rivera were co-author/editors of the book "Hip-Hop as Healing," which Yancey also contributed to.
Lacouir Yancey, left, Emile Jansen and Roberto Rivera at the South African Hip-Hop Museum in 2023. Jansen and Rivera were co-author/editors of the book 'Hip-Hop as Healing,' which Yancey also contributed to.
Rivera’s path to becoming an internationally known youth development advocate and educator was full of his own trials, tribulations and tumultuous times as a teen.
Though born in Madison, he attended 13 different schools before high school around the country, including in Florida, California, Colorado and Texas.
He was diagnosed with learning disabilities early in his schooling. He also recalls “a lot of family drama. I needed a way to regulate myself and my emotions,” he says.
And that’s where hip-hop helped him begin to heal. “I was into breakdancing and was always a closet poet,” he says. “I also got into skateboarding and graffiti. Then, I eventually became a freestyle rap fanatic and started expressing my lyrics not just on a page in my notebook, but over a beat.”
As a teen, Rivera struggled with drugs and began to get into trouble. After some violence, threats and rehab, his mom moved his family — including his developmentally-disabled younger brother, who would later pass away from leukemia — back to Madison.
A guiding light in his life at the time was his grandfather, who died suddenly from a heart attack when Rivera was 19. “When he died, I learned about how many people in our community he mentored and how he was involved in all of these nonprofits,” Rivera says. “That’s when I realized what life was all about, it’s not about all this partying stuff, it’s about a legacy of helping others.
“I sought out to do that but make it my own. I took my grandfather’s legacy, sampled it and remixed it for myself,” he says. “I call this switch ‘going from dope dealer to hope dealer.’”
He enrolled in Madison College, then transferred to UW-Madison, where he became a co-creator of the still-running First Wave Hip Hop & Urban Arts Scholarship Program for hip-hop artists, activists and scholars. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Along the way, Rivera founded The Good Life Organization, a nonprofit that uplifted youth in Chicago by combating negative messages and working to reduce rates of school dropouts, violence and incarceration. In 2017, Good Life was acquired by 7 Mindsets, a digital education company that engages youth to create positive change in their communities.
Now, as co-founder of Alliance for the 7th Generation, Rivera travels frequently, creating programs and consulting with school districts, community organizations and social service systems to help them reimagine and reconfigure their programs, putting healing, well-being and cultural sustainability at the center.
Rivera tailored his message into one he calls “hip-hope,” aiming to inspire young adults who struggle with school and life challenges, just as he did.
Hip-Hop as Healing is a collection of essays by hip-hop scholars and practitioners, exploring how the culture that created rap music, graffiti, breakdancing and turntablism helped them overcome life’s challenges.
The first section is centered on how hip-hop helped the contributors to heal. The second focuses on how redefining public spaces to become spaces of healing — for instance,
creating a recording studio in a Boys & Girls Club. “It’s about how we’re changing these spaces to help others,” says Rivera.
A third section explores how personal growth moves outward to improve the community.
“It’s about tapping into that higher power — that could be spirit, it could be community, it could be our ancestors,” he says. “Realizing that we can recalibrate and change our realities. We can change policies, we can change the social, economic and political fabric that we find ourselves living in.”
Rivera says the book is for three primary audiences: artists, educators and scholars. “We want to partner more with youth and communities in authentic ways to do research that can help improve the systems,” he says. “We can show young people how to learn to impact systems and make a difference and dream up an idea and then pull it off.”
Rivera hopes his talk at the Dane Arts conference motivates the artists there to explore how their art can help others heal.
“There's an opportunity and a need for folks to heal. You can heal yourself and for those who are called to it, you can become an artist-in-residence, you can be an artist-educator,” he says. “And there are steps to take to get there and resources to help you lean into this.”
